Scottish Conference 13-17 April 2009
St Leonard's School, St Andrews
“Working with Emotions: A Path to Spiritual and Psychological Growth”
with
Professor Robert Elliott *
Emotions are an essential part of what make us human, helping us take in what is important for us in the situations in our lives, offering direction for effective action; and linking body and spirit. However, many of our experiences of our emotions are quite difficult: We often find ourselves stuck in repetitive, painful emotions, or we find ourselves numb and unable to access important feelings when we need them in our relationships with others, or we get overwhelmed and frightened by emotions that we are not sure we can bear. So emotions have great power for good and ill in our spiritual and psychological lives, making it vitally important that we develop our ability to effectively work with our own and others’ emotions in our daily lives, relationships and psychological and spiritual development. The theme for this conference is therefore working with emotions as a path for spiritual and psychological growth and accompaniment. In plenary sessions and workshops, Robert Elliott will guide participants through a series of sessions aimed at introducing the basic concepts of contemporary emotion theory, including presentations, small group exercises, and sharing.
Process-Experiential Therapy
Research-informed neo-humanistic therapies have an important rôle to play in today’s behavioural health care field. The key to effective client change is facilitating client emotional intelligence through expressing, exploring, understanding and restructuring emotions within a genuinely empathic, prizing relationship. Therapists can help clients by adopting a person-centred but process-guided relational stance that combines following the client’s content with leading their process. Working effectively with clients requires adapting the therapist’s approach to the client’s general presenting problems, the within-session task, and the client’s immediate experience in the moment. The best way to learn a complex therapy such as PE therapy is through a variety of activities, including didactic learning, examples, supervised practice, personal growth work, experience in the client rôle, and reflection. www.process-experiential.org
Plenary 1 - The importance of emotion in human function and dysfunction. Adaptive value and role of emotion: signalling function, preparation for action, integration of experience.
Plenary 2 - Emotion schemes. Structure and aspects of emotions. Difficulties with incomplete processing of emotion. Emotion scheme model. Methods of elaborating emotions.
Plenary 3 - Emotion Responses: Adaptive and non-adaptive. Primary adaptive, primary maladaptive, secondary reactive, instrumental. Methods for identifying type of emotion response.
Workshops:
Emotion Regulation 1: Gentle Ways for Containing Overwhelming Emotions: Clearing a Space.
Emotion Regulation 2: Safe Ways of Accessing Blocked Emotions: Two Chair work.
Further details to follow
*Robert Elliott, Ph.D.
Professor of Counselling, University of Strathclyde (Scotland)
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Toledo (USA)
Chair, Management Team, Counselling Unit
Editor Emeritus, Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies
Scientific Director, International Project on the Effectiveness of
Psychotherapy and Psychotherapy Training
